Preserving object-relational databases for the next generations

Increasingly, resources are “born digital” and their associated formats are short-lived. Subsequently, the development of environments to preserve such digital content over the very long-term (50 years or more) has become a critical issue. To date, however, the preservation of data as contained in object-relational databases has been widely overlooked. Here, the task is inherently complicated by the nature of the data (relational as well as multimedia). Furthermore, the internal structure of the database and the associated applications need to be preserved as it evolves over time. This paper presents an environment to preserve object-relational databases over a very long period of time. We show that our environment is able to host and access multiple databases as they evolve over time.